I How do you read? In posing this question, I have in mind the Surrealists’ question of 1919: “Why do you write?” But this time around the question is about reading. Weren’t the Surrealists also great readers? In André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, didn’t he turn his readings of Lautréamont, Roussel, Arthur Cravan, Leonora Carrington, and Alfred Jarry into full-fledged literary performances? And what are we to make of Borges, the late-arriving Surrealist, so enamored of the fantastic and of artifice, seeking out the algebra of dreams and the key to cities, and maintaining thirty years later that the only history that counts is not that of literature but that of reading. Books are immobile, he said, compact, closed in on themselves, identical. And the only things that change over time, and thus make history, are the ways we read them. And what are we to think of his concocted “true confessions” in which he asserts that writers must be judged on the basis of the readings they have inspired, the enthusiasm they have generated, and that he, Borges, is no prouder of the books he wrote than of those he read well? So, reading. The practices and purposes of reading. “How do you read?” asks another great reader, Italo Calvino. “Sitting, stretched out, head down, while eating, in a cafe, after getting up in the morning, before going to bed?” Are there places, times, life circumstances, or historical moments that seem more suited to the unpunished vice that Valery Larbaud believed reading to be? Is solitude required? Silence? Do you sometimes read out loud? If so, when? And haven’t we lent too much credence to Augustine’s story of his astonishment at discovering Ambrose reading silently in the garden of the bishop’s palace in Milan and declaring that this very place and time marked the passage from reading aloud to reading in a quiet, inward, concentrated, modern manner? In the universities of our youth, we learned about Latins, such as Propertius and Martial, who, before Ambrose, already read silently. And if the contemporaries of Augustus were so given to oral recitations at the home of Maecenas, protector of poets, doesn’t that mean that the usual practice was to read silently or in a low voice? Conversely, Flaubert was not reluctant to put his books to the test of the gueuloir. He would bellow his prose, scream it as loudly as he could, until he thought it was right. Zola, in his remembrances of the Rue Murillo, said that Flaubert even required his readers to declaim what they were reading. Hugo did the same. And the aging Louis Aragon who, in a bar on the Rue des Saints-Pères where he followed me one night, may have been speaking to the old man he was, to the former young man, to Antoine or Anthoine (his doppelgängers), to the person he called the performer, the narrator, or the third-party author, to Elsa, to his last readers, or in fact to me and to the young man I once was — in any event, there in the bar he is offering me a part in the film to be made from his novel Aurelien. He tries to persuade me by improvising, at 1:30 in the morning, amid the empty tables, a coruscant reading of several pages of the novel. How clearly I recall the stentorian delivery that he adopted to demonstrate that this was how he wanted to be read: in a very loud voice! And of the many writers who recently did me the honor of participating in my inquiry into their habits of reading in my journal La Règle du Jeu, how many are of the same mind? How many would follow the example of Virgil, who could declaim the Georgics for four days straight? In Rome, it was said that he had no talent more enviable than his tone, his eloquence, his touch. Two thousand years later, don’t authors write for ears as much as for eyes? And are we doing a text an injustice if we fail to recite it? Frame the question any way you will. There is an art of reading. It is probably not as high an art as writing. But among those who do it best, it is intimately tied to writing. And for fans of Borges, Aragon, or Virgil, it requires an aptitude no less rare. Can that art be taught? In principle, yes. And on this point we must stand steadfast against the populist demagogy of innocent and protocol-free reading. But if reading can be taught, how can we prevent the teachers of reading from becoming bogeymen like Monsieur Émile Faguet, the French professional critic, whom the Surrealists imagined slapping? He strove, in his mediocre art of reading, to reeducate the “pretty little reader” whose enthusiasm fades as fast as infatuation. How to shield this “pretty little reader,” who believes that a reading event is the same as an amorous one? “You don’t learn to be in love,” she says, “you fall in love! You don’t learn to read, you read!” And she is right. How to preserve the mixture of freedom and intelligence, of sensuality and culture, the bemused grace, the rapture that Roland Barthes called the pleasure of the text, which no initiation must be allowed to diminish? That is yet another question. And it is one of the puzzles that preoccupied the Surrealists as they worked, not only on automatic writing but also on automatic reading, with its free associations, its felicitous blunders, and its tendency, as they would say, to “slip on the roof of the winds.” An assortment of other questions. Do we read better or worse (whether silently or aloud) when we know in advance (or do not know) the name of the author? At what point should we act on our knowledge of a book’s existence? Is it in the storm of its publication, when the weight of the reviews and misunderstandings that pile up so
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence